Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (4 page)

Here, then, was her first adoption of a male persona in her writing. In conversation and correspondence she became known as the ‘father’ figure in the little family of her circle of friends. Reconstructing those days, Stein would convert this masculine posturing into a typically eccentric, perversely cocky but revealing wisecrack about a friend who encouraged her to support women’s suffrage, about which she was unenthusiastic: ‘Not, as Gertrude Stein explained to Marion Walker, that she at all minds the cause of women or any other cause but it does not happen to be her business.’
⁸
Her reaction to the chauvinism she encountered in her university career and to the struggle to be considered in the same league as her male counterparts seems to have been to make a serendipitous leap of illogic, and place herself weirdly above the whole fray.

At Radcliffe Stein was known as an unconventional figure who sported a sailor’s cap (the first of many items of debonair headgear); spirited, confident, well liked, a keen talker, she became secretary of the philosophy debating club. Her teenage melancholy seemed to have been overcome; in its place was a warmth and a palpable enjoyment of life that drew people to her.

In 1895 Leo pulled out of Harvard Law School and went to New York, where he was drawn to a glamorous group of worldly-wise New Men, globetrotters, newspapermen, politicians and art collectors. He began his own travels; setting sail for Antwerp, his first European trip as an adult culminated in Paris, where he spent most of his time in the Louvre, honing himself as an art critic. On his return he was asked to play companion to the Steins’ cousin Fred on a trip to Japan, where he became a connoisseur of Japanese art; and after that he started urging Gertrude to join him on his next jaunt, back to Europe.
⁹

Gertrude, meanwhile, had plunged into the era of new sciences which branched out from evolution theory. Her major courses were in psychology, zoology and botany; among her tutors were William James, Josiah Royce, Hugo Münsterberg and George Santayana, all engaged in explaining the ‘American mental quality’,
¹⁰
as well as Charles B. Davenport, who was to become America’s leading eugenicist. During this period Stein’s lifelong interest in defining character solidified. That Stein trained as a psychologist and a zoologist in the laboratories at Harvard is of paramount importance to all her subsequent literary experiment.
¹¹
Her scientific persona had a direct effect on her literary compositions. Mina Loy recognized this in her poetical tribute to Stein in 1924:

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word
¹²

In point of fact Stein was useless as a chemist. But her work in experimental psychology, neuropsychology and zoology, and then in the mapping of the brain that was going on at Johns Hopkins, gave her a unique relation, as a creative writer, to the science of her day.

When Stein first entered the Harvard Psychology Laboratory in 1893, the science itself was in its infancy. For the orphaned Stein, to whom so many doors were open, so many possibilities on the horizon, who saw herself springing into a new world in which the laws of the old were no longer necessarily applicable (she shared the common millenarian note of her era), psychology was a new science with which to classify that world, a system to grasp onto. And one of its fathers, that unconventional champion of liberated thinking, William James, was her teacher. His
Principles of Psychology
, one of the founding texts of the new science, had been published three years before Gertrude enrolled at Radcliffe. In her sophomore year Stein studied under James’s protégé, Hugo Münsterberg, who wrote to her at the end of the year that she had been his ‘ideal student’.
¹³
Münsterberg believed that every psychological occurrence had its basis in a physiological one. So satisfactory was Stein’s first year’s work of experimental psychology with him in the area of acoustics that she was invited the following year by James himself to take part in his seminars, and carry out experiments supervised by him in person.

Here is Stein’s (perhaps apocryphal) note to Professor James at the top of an end of year exam paper, which she abandoned unwritten: ‘Dear Professor James, ... I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day’; and his supposed riposte: ‘Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself’ — after which, she claimed, he gave her top marks, and she still got to go to the opera.
¹⁴
The anecdote distils a certain dilettantish attitude to her scientific career, but also a desire to present herself as a favourite of the great man. In her third year at Radcliffe, in 1896, under James’s suggestion and guidance, Stein embarked on a series of experiments into automatism with her classmate Leon Solomons.

‘Automatic writing’ was at the time a favourite tool of mediums and spiritualists who claimed it provided a connection with the spirit world. William James himself was on famously equivocal and open terms with this spiritualist view of the mind’s powers. But psychology officially considered automatic writing a door instead to the unconscious regions of human thought. Its use was particularly common in the treatment of hysteria, as hysterics were supposed to be more susceptible to allowing that buried ‘second personality’ to express itself.

Technically what Stein and Solomons produced was distracted writing.
¹⁵
They would read a novel and distractedly scribble sentences at the same time; or one of them would read a piece of writing while the other read something aloud to them, and they eventually achieved a state of mind that allowed them to carry out both acts simultaneously. The aim was to distinguish how the sort of ordinary, distracted acts that everyone performs every day, without paying attention to them, shaded into the so-called ‘second consciousness’ of the hysteric.
¹⁶
In other words, to show that what was attributed to that ‘second personality’ could be done by normal people in a distracted state, thereby disproving the theory of a second personality. By achieving a sort of dissociation from their own acts by distraction, Stein and Solomons summarized that hysteria was ‘a
disease
of the
attention
’. This work was eventually published as ‘Normal Motor Automatism’. In their joint publication Stein and Solomons write that they are ‘both ... perfectly normal — or perfectly ordinary’;
¹⁷
by attributing normality to themselves they become assimilated within the objectivity, neutrality and universality claimed by contemporary science.
¹⁸
The question of what constitutes the ‘normal’ would be one which lingered in Stein’s work ever after.

In 1934, when Stein’s literary work had gained both popularity and notoriety, it was the subject of a critique by the psychologist B. F. Skinner, published prominently in
The Atlantic Monthly
, entitled ‘Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?’ Skinner claimed that, using the techniques of automatic writing, in
Tender Buttons
(published in 1914) Stein had invented a second personality for her narrator, one without a past or much intellect. Many readers followed Skinner into using automatic writing as an answer to the puzzle of Stein’s more challenging techniques, her ‘unintelligible’ sentences. Couching their claims in fairly hostile if not outrightly misogynist language, critics not only claimed that Stein was a practitioner of automatic writing, but suggested that because Stein’s poetry resembled its dissociated effects, it amounted to a proof of her own hysterical tendencies, her own ‘degenerate’ nature. It was a censorious view that linked the breaking of literary rules with moral laxity, a view of words themselves as morally diseased. It has been one of the most lingering myths surrounding Stein’s work, though it has often been refuted.

Stein herself disputed the idea that any of her work was produced by automatic writing, and noted that she didn’t even think what she and Solomons had produced in the laboratory could properly be classed as automatic writing — she didn’t think it was possible under laboratory conditions. She said that ‘writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in automatically.’
¹⁹
She did not believe, in fact, that unless one was hypnotized, it was possible to produce writing that did not in some way ‘make sense’. How she described the result of the experiments was that ‘A phrase would seem to get into the head and keep repeating itself at every opportunity ... The stuff written was grammatical, and the words and phrases fitted together all right, but there was not much connected thought.’
²⁰
Stein and Solomons had been looking for writing with nothing, no consciousness behind it — but there was, she later contended, no such thing. Speaking specifically about
Tender Buttons
, she told an interviewer: ‘I made innumerable efforts to
make words
write
without sense and found it impossible. Any human being putting down words had to make sense of them’ (my emphasis).
²¹
That attempt at transference of agency to the words themselves, rather than the consciousness behind them, was an important admission. The removal of meaning from words had been part of the experiment of
Tender Buttons
; it just hadn’t worked. She would continue to insist on exploring the freedom of words from meanings and antecedents: ‘I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do’, she later wrote.
²²

Stein and Solomons had, after all (with a certain amount of scientific naivety) used themselves as subjects. The lines that Stein produced in the experiment with Solomons showed, as they reported, ‘a marked tendency to repetition’ — later a characteristically ‘Steinian’ device — and some of them seem to sound pre-emptive echoes of her later style: ‘When he could not be the longest and thus to be, and thus to be the strongest’.
²³

Stein, with skull and microscope, late 1890s.

What Skinner disregarded in his attempt to discredit Stein’s writing by noting the similarities of the finished product to automatic writing, and linking them to the outpourings of hysteria, was Stein’s awareness of her own effects. She was bound to deny it, but there is little doubt that, although in later years she did not actively practice automatic writing, Stein was intrigued by the idea, and she was obsessed by the question of how writing is linked to consciousness. She became, with her background in psychology and neuropsychology, a powerful thinker and theorist on the relation of writing to the work of the brain, and her ‘experimental’ writing — perhaps the
most
experimental work produced by any writer of the twentieth century — depended on recognition of aspects of how writing works that are normally left implicit or unnoticed.
²⁴
As Steven Meyer argues in his detailed study of the relation of Stein’s scientific career to her creative writing, in doing so she not only absorbed scientific ideas into her writing, nor merely wrote in a spirit of scientific enquiry, nor simply used science as a metaphor, but made her creative writing itself into a kind of experimental science.
²⁵
In science, the failure of one experiment could lead the practitioner on to further discoveries; so Stein included her failures in her work. In the midst of her most grammatically and verbally ‘experimental’ period, she wrote ‘I see I have a trained eye I do microscopic work’.
²⁶
Although she later tried to shake off the experimental model (in
Everybody’s Autobiography
), this was partly to do with her reluctance to be called an ‘experimental writer’, a tag which seemed to suggest inferiority, a secondary status in the pantheon of literary greatness. She preferred to see herself as an inventor or, most of all, a genius.

Her experience of ‘automatic writing’ primarily instilled in her the new and radical perspective of seeing writing as an artefact, a product rather than a process, and gave her an idea of the words on the page as objects in themselves which need not necessarily be related to one another, a Saussurean realization of the randomness of the linguistic sign (although, of course, independently arrived at), a slippage of meaning in words as signifiers which could bring them into new relations with one another. Her attempts at removing meaning from words were both disconcerting and, eventually, liberating. In automatic writing, it was the physical process of the formation of words and word groupings by an independently moving pencil that supplied her with a new vision of the power of words as nothing more or less than words, writing as pure behaviour.
²⁷
(One of Stein’s hobbies was reading people’s handwriting. In doing so, again, she was not looking at the meaning of the words on the page, but regarding them as objects which provided indirect clues to character.) It was also the first of her enquiries into ‘How Writing is Written’, which would become a pervasive theme of her own work. In the 1930s she would lecture on words and their relation to consciousness, the mind of words.